


Nevertheless

by Cambusmore



Category: 18th & 19th Century CE RPF, 19th Century CE RPF, Arts & Sciences RPF, Original Work, Victorian RPF
Genre: Comfort, Confusion, Light Angst, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-11-04
Updated: 2013-11-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 12:18:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1031631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cambusmore/pseuds/Cambusmore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>London, 1859: Cressida Reynolds never looks at the men who drink their wages at her father's gin palace, until one of them renders her a great service, and she finds she cannot look away.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Cinnamon Street

**Author's Note:**

> This is going to be huge and it will very much merit an E rating in time. Bear with.

London, 1859

In her desperation, Cressida makes a vow: if Mrs. Morrow shrieks like that again, she will have to do something.

What precisely, she hasn’t decided yet. But it must be something effective if she ever hopes to sleep. There will be the Sunday rush to contend with in a few hours, with its relentless standing and roving hands to dodge. She needs to be fresh for it, but there is little chance of that now. Through the wall behind the headboard of Cressida’s bed, the neighbour has been crowing her pain for hours and hours. She hates the sound of it and is inclined to hate Mrs. Morrow for it, too. But it has begun to touch something deeply womanish in her, a sort of grudging sympathy that she curses for weakness because it keeps her awake and hedging instead of dozing, her ears stuffed with cotton. 

In the dark, she listens for the next wail, her nose running lightly in the chill of the room. She hears her own breathing and sniffles and not much beyond, not even the unwelcome but customary snoring of her father. Maybe it is over. She doesn’t perceive the cry of an infant, though. Maybe it is dead. Maybe Mrs. Morrow is. Maybe they both are. The silence looms over Cressida, heavy and dark. Turns out it does not bring the relief she had expected, but rather a welling pool of panic in her chest. There is nothing coming from behind that wall. It’s enough to make one muse about mortality and the fleetingness of existence and all the other things they tried to tell her about when her mother died. Belatedly, Mrs. Morrow screams again, but this time it flattens out to a sort of defeated moan, a capitulation in sound. Cressida is propelled out of bed with sudden urgency. 

Down the pitched hall she hurries, chased by the sound of her neighbour dying, her bare toes bumping numbly along the wood. There is no light under her father’s door, nor any coming from the parlour at the opposite end of the house. She hesitates. She has no sense of time, having awoken with a start at the neighbour’s howls. It is dark enough to be the middle of the night. Surely the situation merits waking him. The cold is remarkable. Her feet ache with it. The brass of the doorknob sings with it in her palm. 

“Daddy?” she asks leaning into the dark wedge of the room. Distantly, Mrs. Morrow takes up her sobbing wail again and she cannot hear if he replies under it. Opening the door the whole way, she steps in. “Daddy?”

He is not there and has not been. Without light, she can just see that counterpane lies pristine. She made the bed herself that morning and he has never picked today to start making it himself. He can hardly be in the parlour with the gas off. He can hardly be sitting there in the dark, impassive to the ordeal next door. Can he? Stumbling back down the hall, the quiet from the front windows tells her the pub is closed. Perhaps he has lingered to mend something. Perhaps he has already gone to the Morrows’ to help. 

In her room, she lights a candle with shaking hands and begins to dress to a minimum of decency. The moaning continues behind the wall, incongruously reassuring. Her darkest work dress goes over her night rail, as she has a vague notion of untold fluids next door. On her way down the stairs, Cressida spares herself a moment of self-pity. She is really thoroughly unequipped to contend with this problem. She has no notion, not concretely, of what is happening to the neighbour. She was not raised in the country. She has not seen horses at it and veals being born. She has only ever seen a cow, mutton or veal both without its skin and for sale. And it is at this thought of swinging carcasses that the front door swings shut and latches behind her and she groans, “My key!” in singular despair. She thinks big, horrid pub words. She nearly mutters them and then coughs instead as the crisp air seizes her lungs. Two small mercies: the Morrows’ door is near, not four steps away, and it is unlatched.

Upstairs, in a dim bedroom that is the twin of Cressida’s, the Morrows’ small boy, Arthur, sits at the foot of the bed, his fingers in his mouth, munching on them with studious concentration. A younger child, she cannot remember its name or sex, flails quietly on the rug. All of this Cressida can see from the hallway where she is indulging is some cowardly dawdling. 

“Harry?” rasps Mrs. Morrow, hopeful. Cressida turns into the room with feigned confidence and is hit first by the stench and second by the sight of those suspected fluids, which, as it happens, are both abundant and inimical to paler textiles. 

“Ah, no Mrs. Morrow, it’s Cressida.” 

“Oh girl, my dear girl, you must help me.” Mrs. Morrow, who may or may not be called Thomasina, begins to weep piteously and reaches for her. Cressida stands well back from the bed where the woman writhes and lolls. There is blood very nearly everywhere and a large puddle of something else on the floor, near where Arthur samples his fingers. She looks from it to him. He regards her with something approaching disdain. 

“Essie, pleeeaaaaaaaaase!” whines Mrs. Morrow, her body arching with pain. Cressida winces and approaches, moved at last by empathy. She will soon wish she had stayed at the threshold. The neighbour labours in a drench of sweat, her dark hair sticking to her forehead and across her throat as if it means to choke her. Her skin, normally a touch sallow, has gone a ghastly greenish grey, devoid of any human colour. It shines with perspiration, nearly glowing in the gloom. The worst thing of all is her eyes, though: they are sunken and hard-rimmed with purple, as if someone has smeared ink around them with a finger. The one thing Mrs. Morrow can help, her expression, the look in those eyes, speaks of terror and certainty, imparts it to Cressida. This is death, she thinks, I am looking at death. 

“What can I do, Mrs. Morrow? I will do anything.”

“Will you have a look, Essie? Will you look?”

“Oh, I couldn’t. I don’t- What am I looking for?”

“A baby,” Mrs. Morrow gasps and shudders, and then weakly, “any sign of a baby.” Cressida goes to the foot of the bed, avoiding Arthur, and lifts the neighbour’s chemise with some trepidation. It is heavy and sodden with sweat. She kneels and looks at things she can’t even name or indeed see very well in the dimness. 

“I don’t know what I’m looking for,” ventures Cressida helplessly. She looks up at Mrs. Morrow beckoning to her impatiently. 

“Come back, come back.” The neighbour takes her by the wrist and pulls her down close. The panic is seeping out of her and threatens to overtake Cressida. There is fear in that room, like a living thing. 

“You must go to the Crone, Essie.” She whimpers as she is racked again with pain, almost standing on her head and feet with it, as if offering her quivering belly (her belly that is disconcertingly moving) up to God. Cressida is so entranced that she notices too late that Mrs. Morrow means to break her wrist with her grip. She snatches it away when the woman finally collapses back to the bed. She is getting weak. Her eyes, filmed with tears and being subsumed into her skull, slide over to Cressida. “The Crone. I am dying. Help me. The Crone.”

“Where?” whispers Cressida.

“Cinnamon Street. Go!” She pushes at her and turns her head away. She has given up. That gesture is worse than anything thus far, worse even than her eyes.

Cressida places two fingers on the woman’s temple briefly, for comfort, and picks up both the children. Arthur’s legs churn against her ribs. She deposits them in the parlour, so they cannot later say that they watched their mother die.

***

She has only the faintest notion that Cinnamon Street is in Whitechapel, which is east of where she is standing, frightened and cold, feeling that with every moment of her hesitation, she is killing the woman she is meant to be saving. Already she has doubled back twice in the dissimulating darkness, avoiding some dogs and a man lurching inexorably to his left until he toppled into the street. She had cut through some mews to avoid him and what little sense of direction she had then grew altogether disordered. Now she is back, she thinks anyway, near to where she should have started from, although she cannot be certain and there is no one suitable about to ask. 

She should know the area better. It is, after all, her district. But Whitechapel is in the wrong direction. In the bad direction is perhaps more apt. There are great swaths of the city that are forbidden to her. Where she and her father live and work, just behind Narrow Street in Limehouse, is respectable, although listing more towards the disreputable with every passing year. Beyond it are the rookeries and their specific misery like a contagion. In London, you can turn a corner and suddenly there are rag-clad children sitting in the filth of the street, quiet because they are miserable and hungry. There is no one to attend them because their parents are busy with sin. They buy and sell it, do it, invent it. If she doesn’t go to the slums, doesn’t look, doesn’t know, she remains respectable. Just. 

She can easily avoid these areas because they offer her nothing of use. You won’t be buying a good hat in St. Giles. So, when she conjures up the map of the city in her mind, there are holes where there should be slums. Normally this is not problematic. At the moment, however, it really is. Cinnamon Street lies in one of the holes, beyond several more. 

She thinks of Mrs. Morrow’s suffering to get herself moving and resists the urge to suck her thumb or weep. Decisively now, she heads as near as she can to the water without getting too close to the docks, and hugs the Thames, walking quickly without running. It’s not that she can’t run – it’s that she doesn’t want to attract attention by doing so. There are some people about here and there. They pass her quickly in the dark, saying nothing, terrifying her each time, these faceless man-shaped shadows so close she can feel the little breezes they send up in their wake. Cressida wishes for more street lamps and then for none altogether. Though it doesn’t matter about the light. She knows they can tell she is not a man. 

At Milk Yard, Cressida stops, confused again, and holds her hands to her cheeks to try to feel them. She thinks it isn’t far now, but is afraid she’ll overshoot it in the jumble of streets and dead-ends. From behind her comes the sound of two boys, just boys, in mirth and she turns, hoping they can point her right. As they come under the glow of a lamp, they are perhaps not so young as they sound, but small in their ratings’ uniforms. One sees her first and stops with a stumble, the other looks up in surprise and slows down. She hopes they are from London.

“I need help, please.” They look at each other and then back at her.

The fairer of the two clears his throat. “What kind of help?”

“I’m lost, I think,” she smiles apologetically, “do either of you two know where I might find Cinnamon Street?”

They look at each other again. The same one asks, “What street?”

“Cinnamon Street. I reckon,” and she turns to point the way she thinks is east, “that it’s-” When she turns back, they are so close, almost on top of her. She drops her hand, startled. 

“Wuz your name?” asks the other, finally deciding to speak. She takes a step from them, but they move forward and apart. As she backs away, they are on either side of her. Their heads start swaying like those of snakes as they circle.

“Your name,” he repeats, more firmly, and then, as the other catches her wrist and brings it to his cheek, “How much?”

How much, thinks Cressida, and then, close on that thought’s heels, oh no. 

“I’m not, that is, I don’t-” She is trying to pull her hand away from the fair sailor as he drags it towards the flies of his trousers. 

“We won’t cheat you,” the other assures her. “We’ll both pay.” 

At that moment, when she should be thinking up stinging rebukes and plotting her escape, all she can manage to do is wonder how this happened. This was a tale told to frighten country folk away from factory jobs in the city. This was a myth, a parable, a morality play. This was a caricature of London come to life and she had succumbed to it like a bumpkin. 

“Please,” she manages hoarsely, but they take it the wrong way, as invitation, and begin to walk her backwards towards a low wall, one on each arm.

It isn’t even a good morality play, but one of those sensational ones all pious condemnation, but not short on the lurid details. If you had asked Cressida (although why would you), asked her does this happen to anyone in London, she would have said no. She might have rolled her eyes. She might have told you to go back to the country. If you suggested it could happen to her, she would laugh at you. She is going to cry now. It’s lodged in her throat, in waiting, and in her confusion she cannot quite get a scream past it.

“There you are!” It comes clear through the icy air. The ratings stop their progress and look up. She cannot turn to see the man who has spoken, as they’re keeping hold of her. He approaches and stops behind her, close enough to block the cold wind. “You found my cousin. Thank you.” His voice is low and pleasant. “You are not,” he pauses as if offended by the very word, “detaining her?” The sailors release her arms like they burn.

She turns and recognizes him instantly. He is a patron of the pub, the large one so dark-haired he could be foreign. She has thought of him as a boy until now. 

“Cou-sin?” muses the drunker sailor, as if he has never heard of such a thing before. The other remains very near to her, his head cocked to one side as he peers at the man. Her panic is receding enough that she begins to notice a particular tension in the air. 

The man smiles at them benignly. “Yes, my cousin.” Only the hard glint of his black eyes betrays his blandness. He hides it well, but Cressida has seen it. She wonders if the sailors have. She takes a chance.

“Cousin, my apologies, I was so very turned around.” She adds, “Here I am,” unnecessarily and he raises his eyebrows at her. Surely he knows her? He won’t have heard her speak until now, but he’ll have seen her and remembered. He will, of course he will, because she knew him right away. How could he not? Doesn’t he look? Cressida now grows concerned that the instant recognition has not been mutual. 

“Goodnight,” he suggests to the sailors, “thanks again.” They slink away reluctantly, one of them muttering, disappointed. The other breaks and runs. He can be heard to be sick around the corner. The man approaches and takes off his cap, quite close to her but not enough to touch. Loudly he says, “We were all so worried.” 

She is watching the other sailor taking his time to walk away, as if his dignity depended on it. When he does finally stroll around the corner, she says, “Thank you. I didn’t know what to do at all. Thank you.”

He is watching her impassively. “You have a good reason for being out here?”

Her brief explanation of the situation restores her panic immediately. She finds her voice is shaking when she asks for the way to Cinnamon Street.

“It’s close,” he nods in the direction she had been headed, “I’ll take you.” 

The man sets a brisk pace through the narrow streets. She can feel herself begin to be overwhelmed by the plight of Mrs. Morrow, about her feelings of responsibility for her now certain death. Cressida cannot quite breathe. 

He looks at her and asks, “Do I know you?”

She eyes him askance, slightly offended. “You drink your wages where my father is publican.” He does drink to excess. Gin mostly.

“Ah,” he says. They move ahead and she has time to think on that woman’s pain. She feels quite sick all of a sudden.

“They were detaining you,” he observes and for a moment, she does not know of what he speaks.

“Oh, they- Yes, they wanted me to- I think they thought I was a prostitute,” she finishes lamely.

“Yes” is all he says to that. 

“Now, look here-”

He shrugs. “It is three in the morning. You’re in your night clothes.” 

Cressida is working up an answer to that. She is willing to concede that she is not overly dressed for the occasion and that it is well past the time when any sort of decent person should be out. That includes him. She might tell him that. And she does not like the way he has spoken of what she is wearing, your nightclothes, as if he recognizes them. 

He stops and she nearly walks into him.

“We’re here.” 

***

The Crone is slow to rise, slow to answer the door, slow to admit them, and slow to acknowledge that she is the Crone. She does not always enjoy her work. There has always been a Crone in Whitechapel or Limehouse or Stepney or Wapping, maybe for a thousand years. The Crone is here because there are sailors here and with sailors come consequences. They swarm off their ships and into women’s drawers as if to prove a point. She deals in babies in a variety of respects: their prevention, elimination and delivery. The first two facets of her work are not prominently advertised. Cressida, for example, insistently respectable Cressida, has little to no notion of these things, and would not suspect someone of being sought after for them. Some people, women mostly, revere her deeply for her knowledge and the solutions she offers to their seemingly intractable problems, their biggest mistakes. Other people, men mostly, consider the superstitious nonsense she peddles as inimical to the flourishing of Christian civilization and wish her very ill indeed. For this reason, when people come pounding at her door in the middle of the fucking night, and one is a man with a look about him and the other is a woman in her shift, she isn’t sure what to think. So she proceeds cautiously, which to the Crone means with denial and contempt. When, at length, the breathless woman in the shift has decided to finish with her story and shut up finally, the Crone (who sometimes forgets she was ever called Charlotte) knows that these two people are not the malevolent sort. But she is tired and it is cold outside and there is no coin to be made in Limehouse of all places.

***

“But she says- she told me she was dying!” protests Cressida, nearly in tears.

“They all say that,” says the Crone.

“Nevertheless,” says the man quietly. Cressida gets stuck on that word, nevertheless, and the way he says it, like the old woman will eventually have to do what they want and that she knows it very well already. It’s the same way he said goodnight to the sailors and it meant they were leaving directly. The Crone gazes at him for a time and he stares back. Cressida, with Mrs. Morrow’s eyes never far from her thoughts, thinks to accelerate negotiations.

“This isn’t her first baby and she gripped me hard in fear and pain,” she says, pulling back the sleeve of her wrap and showing the Crone the inside of her left wrist. There is a pronounced bump there, a livid red turning purple at the edges. The Crone peers up at the man. 

“Minnie!” she shouts towards the back of the house without looking away from him.

“What?” comes a muffled, but distinctly hostile reply. 

“We’re going out!” More softly to Cressida and the man, she says, “She had better be dying.” 

***

They are hurrying back now, and Cressida is taking note of her surroundings in case this happens again, which it had better not. She and the man have to stop for the old woman and her sort-of apprentice to catch them up, propelled as they are by their ceaseless griping about the cold, the hour, the general circumstances. 

In one of the moments when they are not far behind, the man asks, “What is your name?”

Behind them, Minnie snorts.

“Cressida Reynolds.”

“And do they call you all of that?”

“My father calls me Essie, but I am not overly fond of it.”

“What do you want to be called?” No one has ever asked.

“I call myself Cressida in my head or when I talk to myself, so I suppose Cressida.” The man nods and keeps walking, his eyes ahead. She takes her chance to look at him then. He is really quite big, not overly tall, but built for labour and practiced at it. And he walks with a slight stoop, so you can easily imagine him bent over a task or a tool. It does not detract from his appearance, only seems to render him more manageably proportioned. Nice-big, she thinks, not threat-big. His hands are in his pockets so she cannot see them. She finds she is trying to guess at them anyway.

He stops, turning to her, and Cressida starts, dismayed that he has caught her in frank assessment. He must be about to tell her to stop staring or use another gentle command like nevertheless to compel her to shame, but he only gives her a perfunctory smile. She realizes belatedly that they are just waiting for the Crone and Minnie to reach them.

“What is your name?” she ventures.

His eyes slide to approaching women and back to her. “Ockham,” he says. He offers nothing else.

At the Morrows’ door, Cressida sends the midwife and her sullen assistant up and tries the knocker on her own. She waits, looks up at the front windows, and then peers into the pub’s frosted glass, shielding her eyes from the glare of the streetlamp. Mr. Ockham leans on the Morrows’ doorjamb, waiting.

“He hasn’t come back yet,” she says to him with some entreaty.

He frowns. “You father? He has left you alone?”

“Yes, I think so. I forgot my key.” Stupidly, she finds she is near to weeping with confusion and weariness and cold. 

Mr. Ockham says, “We’ll wait for him in here,” and tilts his head at the Morrows’. She almost wants warmth enough to risk seeing the body of the woman she has killed and the looks on the faces of her children. “She isn’t dead,” he urges and she goes up.

***

Upstairs, she has both seen and heard that Mrs. Morrow is not dead. The Crone has gone to work instantly and when Cressida leaves the room, Minnie is sitting on Mrs. Morrow’s chest. The babies are where she had left them in the parlour. While Mr. Ockham got the coals warm in the grate, she managed to change both children artlessly with linen, hopefully for that purpose, culled from the other bedchamber. She has tried to put the children down to sleep in there but they took up wailing instantly. Now Mr. Ockham and Cressida sit facing each other in the parlour, he on a chair and she on the sofa. He watches her over the head of Arthur asleep on his lap. It is strange, waiting in the sitting room of a woman giving birth down the hall with a man, the hot leaden weight of a sleeping baby, which she has recently determined to be female, sprawled on her front. She looks away from him only to doze in snatches. It is blessedly warm and so many of the people in the room are dead asleep that she cannot altogether resist the urge to join them. Mr. Ockham does not sleep. He only smiles compassionately when she starts at the neighbour’s moans and she thinks, I don’t want to do this, but she hardly knows to what she is referring.

At length, Mr. Ockham rises, holding fast to Arthur and comes to sit next to her on the sofa. His weight on the cushions makes her slide an inch towards him so their legs touch. Cressida reminds herself not to recoil. He can hardly have her here on the sofa underneath some children. With one arm around Arthur, he works at the cuff of his sleeve and brings his left wrist alongside her own, his fingers in a fist. At first, she does not understand and looks down at the wide expanse and the vulnerable skin there, so much lighter than the backs of his fingers. He notices her confusion and nudges her hand and then she sees: the inside of his wrist is swollen with a red lump, the same as the one she bears. They compare marks for a moment and she looks up at him. He is smiling.

“Fell into a hedgerow,” he says to explain the lump, “about a thousand years ago.”

She frowns at him, at his black eyes. His eyebrows are dark and finely curved. They look as though they could express a great deal. Then banging at the door downstairs.

She swallows. “My father.”

“Yes,” he says and moves back to the chair where he should be sitting. Arthur rearranges himself and sighs.


	2. Captain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cressida dwells and dwells on last night, both in bed and behind the counter at the gin palace. Archie observes.

Cressida now lies in her bed, reflecting. This is not her custom. Although she is a thoughtful girl, she does what thinking she needs to do on her feet or leaning on the counter at the public house. In bed, she sleeps. This laid-up thinking feels self-indulgent. It has gone full light outside and although she has stolen but two hours of sleep, last night, this morning, that time, whenever it was, seems distant enough to be a story she heard from someone else.

It had, after all, not been her father at the door, but a miserably contrite Mr. Morrow, whining, “I knew it, I knew it,” all the way up the stairs in a miasma of gin. He glanced at the baby she was holding, decided it wasn’t new, and whimpered. Reaching the landing, he took a step towards Mr. Ockham, who stood there with Arthur still wrapped around him. 

“Who-” began Mr. Morrow, not altogether pleasantly, but events intervened. From down the hall, a thin wail like that of a miffed cat bloomed. Mr. Morrow forgot what he was doing and ran after the sound of the new baby screeching from the cold and the light and being born. 

“Harry, you pigging bastard!” followed in a second. It seemed that Mrs. Morrow was alive, if not well. 

Cressida turned to Mr. Ockham, elated. She wanted to impress upon him the extent of his contribution to this outcome. Had he not come along, she would have been made to lie (or stand, perhaps) with two sailors in the street and Mrs. Morrow and her baby would be dead. He had deferred the loss of her respectability for another day and saved a life and brought one about as well. 

Instead of articulating any of that fine feeling, she simply said, “That isn’t my father.” 

“I gathered.” He was smiling and holding Arthur like a roast as he said it, and suddenly it was all too much. This man, produced at random from the night, began to intrude on what she considered to be the normal course of her life up to that moment. 

“I have to go home,” she said, bent to put the baby on the floor, remembered not to discard children on floors, gave it to him instead, and asked Mr. Morrow for the key to her house. On her way out, she remembered to thank Mr. Ockham and wish him good night, while he stood there looking a bit put out, holding several children in a stranger’s corridor. Back in her room, she was briefly relieved to hear her father snoring softly from his bed, but soon found herself entirely terrified all the same. She hid under the blanket, from what she did not know, until she slept.

Now, she is more uneasy than afraid. Her father is up and making an inordinate amount of noise in the kitchen because she is not there to cook for him at a decent volume. How to broach the awkward subject of his not being in bed, not even being at home, in the early hours of the morning? Who, after all, is she to ask? She is only his daughter. He owes her no explanation. And if she does insist on one, would she not have to account for her own sordid night? The one she passed in the streets of Whitechapel and in a blazing hot parlour in her night clothes with a big, friendly man who only infrequently looked away from her and once touched her wrist? Sordid on the outside of it, but warm and nice and very correct on the inside of it. Nothing happened, chants her head like a striking crowd, nothing happened, nothing happened. 

Downstairs, in the little kitchen and dining room where she and her father take their meals, the sun glows thinly from the window smeared with dirt and dew. Cressida’s father sits at the short table, his hands held up in delighted expectation at the breakfast he has made himself.

“Good morning to you, Essie. Harry Morrow told me what passed last night and so I let you sleep.”

“Daddy, where were you?”

Through a mouthful of fried egg, he asks, “Where was I when?”

“Last night.”

“Why, here, my girl, here.” He spears some more, dripping yoke.

“Daddy, you were not.”

“No, darling, I was, I was.”

He is attacking his food with hostile relish. She watches for a moment.

“You weren’t in your room,” she insists.

“I was, sound asleep.”

“I checked.”

Suddenly, unexpectedly, he slams his hand flat on the table. His breakfast jumps, the silver leaps; tea sloshes over the rim of his cup.

“Now Essie, that’s enough! I was home. In bed.” He never shouts at Cressida, only at everyone else. She finds she is too used to the sound to be very frightened.

She sits down across from him, and lays her palms flat to keep the tablecloth there, expecting another assault. In the direction of her hands, she says quietly, “You were not. I looked in on you.”

“Did you have a light?”

“No.”

“Well then.” He leaves no doubt that the matter is settled.

He continues to eat disconcertingly, in huge sloppy forkfuls. Cressida watches him first in wonder and then with dawning distaste as he races to the end of his meal. Pushing away from the table and throwing his jacket over his shoulder, he means to go.

She traces the pattern of the spilled tea on the tablecloth with the idle deliberation of someone pretending not to care. In a tone that should be warning enough, she ventures, “Wasn’t Mrs. Morrow awfully quiet for a woman enduring such a thing?”

“Yes, prodigious brave. Not a peep.” 

***

Archie has been sitting at The Pillar of Salt for nigh on an hour, closely watchful of what’s occurring. He is a keen observer of man and his foibles and where there is drink, foibles abound. He collects behaviours, as one might collect sea glass. There is a joy he draws from displaying his collection, saying, ‘Doesn’t so-and-so touch his hat over much,’ and ‘Would that she would stop chewing the inside of her cheek,’ or ‘Does not he always find a way of standing in the light that suits him so.’ Archie loves nothing more than to say what it is that proves elusive to others about the way people are. When they gasp at his powers of observation, he could float. They beg, ‘Do me, have at me’ but they don’t want to hear, not in truth. Tom, who sits with him now, does not want to know that they drink in silence because they both always save their best stories for Ockham, who’ll make it worth their while with his keen interest and ready laughter. 

After some early, ill-judged attempts, Archie refrains from trying to understand Ockham better. He has no outward peculiarities he can discern, nothing that Archie can point to and say, ‘There. He is doing such-and-such,’ except that he smiles. The sum of Ockham, his habits and manner, is too indistinct to parse in the usual way. That’s odd in itself. And Archie never turns his talented eye inside. He won’t say what he thinks is in a man’s heart or speculate on his lot in life. He is no great gossip because he is mightily afraid it will turn on him one day. And what would they have to talk about except for what he will not admit to himself. No one knows because he doesn’t know. Not yet. And so he is content just to watch what people do and not try to guess why. This is how he notices that there has been something amiss at The Pillar since they arrived. He has discerned it quickly, but needs to see it a few more times to believe it. 

Finally, he says, “Have you noticed – she’s looking up when people come in,” 

“I had,” admits Tom.

Ockham comes in and stops to talk to Rainbow Archer right inside the door. Behind the counter, the girl looks up.

Archie: There again. I’ve never seen the like.

Tom: Nor I.

They are not the only ones who have noticed. As some East India Dock boys enter and stand gawkily at the threshold, at least eight heads turn towards the girl to see what she will do. She does not look up.

Tom: She’s not doing it.

Archie: Yes. Yes. 

He is all consternation, part excitement.

Ockham has waded through his more dubious acquaintances now and joins them at the table. They are intent on the girl and do not greet him.

Ockham: Thanks.

More people have come in and the girl still does not look up. She comes out from behind the counter and begins her usual turn about the place, collecting glasses from the tabletops, her eyes on her work or the floor or the middle distance.

Archie: You missed it.

Ockham: What’s that?

Tom: She’s been looking up when people come in.

Ockham: Has she?

Archie: But now she’s stopped.

She passes quite near them to take away the glasses and shells of their huge neighbour (who one hopes is a butcher for all the blood under his nails). He smiles at her from behind his moustache, but she does not see him. They cannot even think of some other subject to pretend to be talking about. She moves away.

Tom: I love her. I would have her.

Archie: The feeling may not be mutual.

Tom: Do you think she knows how much we talk about her?

Ockham: No.

Archie, shaking his head: Now it’s like she was never even looking up at all!

He likes the pattern of phenomena and this, this is a phenomenon whose pattern is bedlam. People’s habits do not change. Their manner remains the same. There are the slight alterations, magnifications brought on by drink or love or poverty, but they still do all the same things. Do them less or more or louder, but they always do them. She has always been the girl who never looks up, never speaks. Then she began to look up and stopped again in the space of an afternoon. 

Tom: She’s-

The girl, known as Cressida only to Ockham, reaches their table, bends her fair head, and puts their empty glasses on her platter. There are quite a lot of them for it is Sunday. Tom looks abashed, but she never shows judgment. She could be carved on the prow of a ship for all her expression changes. When she has collected everything, she places a very large gin before Ockham. It isn’t a finger of it, it’s an entire hand of the stuff. The thud of the glass on the table is loud enough to turn heads. She swings away, her tray aloft. 

The world, as it is, ends.

Men and some women (wives, whores, sweethearts, a certain kind of mother &c. &c.) take up a loud and open speculation at what has just transpired. 

Tom: She’s gone mad.

Archie is staring hard at Ockham who has the good sense to look a little embarrassed at the uproar. Underlying that, however, maybe he is not half-pleased.

Archie: Is there something you’d like to tell us, Jack?

He clears his throat of the burn of gin.

Ockham : Later.

Tom: (looking at them) What? (looking at her) What?

She has maintained her carefully empty expression all the while. That look is as part of her uniform as her grey muslin frock; it is so devoid of anything remotely interesting or interested that for some time, they had thought her feeble-minded. That was until Ockham had overheard her articulately upbraiding the publican over his improper approach to procurement from the privacy (or so she thought) of the cellar stairway.

Ockham, rising: I’m going to talk to her.

His mates lunge to pull him down.

Archie: You can’t do that! It’s the rule!

Tom: Mad. Everyone mad.

Archie: Jack, please – I like coming here.

Ockham: Do you think Publican will exact collective punishment?

Archie: What is collection punishment?

Tom is disintegrating and only clutches at his friend’s sleeve, bleating inarticulate distress. Ockham disengages his fingers one by one and walks to the counter with the habitual stooping grace that Archie has already noted is rare in a big man.

***

“Hullo,” says Mr. Ockham.

As she has never acknowledged any patron in the history of her tenure at The Pillar of Salt, Cressida is unprepared to deal with the consequences. She looks up only momentarily from drying glasses.

“Yes?” she asks abruptly, annoyed.

“I’m not sure if you remember me, you brought me this,” he indicates the gin, “not over a minute ago.”

Oh, ha ha, she wants to say. “Yes, I remember.”

“I wanted to say thank you, if you’ll look at me.”

She looks up and slings the cloth across her shoulder. Her father, further down the counter, has stopped mid-service and is watching them in wary assessment. His patron, itching for his gin and peppermint, stares with growing agitation at his half-empty glass (for he is a half-empty, not half-full, sort of fellow).

She lifts her chin. “Then say it.”

He is smiling, as always, although perhaps less blandly. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Can I drink it here while you work?”

“No,” she scoffs.

The anxious patron shouts “Oi!” at her father, and leans forward to tug at his apron. Her father vaults cleanly over the counter in answer. 

“Can I stand here then?”

“I can’t prevent it.”

“Will you speak to me if I do?”

“Not really.”

They pause in their negotiation of terms to watch the tussle nearby. “Rule three,” her father is bellowing into the impatient man’s face, “no sass!” Rules one and two are don’t look at the girl and don’t speak to the girl, respectively.

“There is a rule three?” Mr. Ockham asks, surprised.

“It is new. Mr. Ockham?” she ventures.

“Just Ockham,” he says. 

“Regardless, go back to your friends, please.” She looks at them pointedly. Imbeciles that they are, they turn to look in opposite directions as if they have not been staring apprehensively all along. One of them, the watchful one, undertakes a careful study of the ceiling.

Ockham shakes his head. “Cressida, you brought me something that made me glad.” He swishes the gin. “I mean to thank you.”

“You cannot mean to call me Cressida,” she says, quite appalled. 

“Of course. Since last night, I call you Cressida in my head and when I talk to myself.” He is quoting her words back to her with impunity. He makes it sound more ridiculous than it had sounded to her at the time, which was very. 

“You’re laughing at me.”

“No, not at all. Too informal, then? What of Farmer Reynolds?” She makes a point of ignoring him. “You’re holding out for Captain Reynolds?”

She glances sharply away at nothing on a bare wall to hide a smile, although not quickly enough.

“Captain,” he teases gently.

Neither of them speaks for long enough. She is looking at his hands, now lightly stroking the counter, with their long sun-browned fingers and the marks of seafaring upon them: a red cross by the bottom of his right thumb, some patterned dots. Could those be a constellation? The map of the sky on the back of his hand. That feels important. 

There is an alarming crash of glass and wood and tile as the disgraced patron, being compelled out the door by her father, tries to take a table with him. Perhaps a dozen people have risen to watch events unfold and opine on them obscenely. 

“Yesterday,” starts Ockham quietly under the din.

“Yes?” Cressida doesn’t want to know, not really. Her guts have dropped to her shoes.

“I knew you. I asked who you were to see if you remembered me from here. But I knew you. Right away. I knew the back of your head in the dark.”

Cressida’s rubbing at the counter, red and miserable with the exquisite awkwardness of the conversation. She’s embarrassed that he’s making a point of telling her this and embarrassed by how pleased she’s pretending not to be. Mr. Ockham just rolls the gin that’s left in the bottom of his glass. Quite a lot of it’s gone already. She glances up finally and catches mild frustration on Mr. Ockham’s face and over his shoulder, contentment on her father’s. He’s proudly surveying his establishment, fists on hips, beaming. That is, until he notices that someone (Mr. Ockham) is flagrantly violating rules one and two (looking at her, talking to her). He seems to bend forward ever so slightly. It does not bode well that inclination. Its logical conclusion is a charge, not a proffered hand or a doffed cap. He is moving towards them so fast, she can hardly warn Mr. Ockham.

“Um-” attempts Cressida.

“Essie!” snaps her father and startles Ockham into a flinch.

“Daddy,” she holds up a placating hand, “this is Mr. Ockham who helped me find the midwife for Mrs. Morrow last night. He escorted me.”

Her father studies the young man with undisguised contempt, although she sees that he is grudgingly relinquishing his murderous intent. It is receding from his eyes. 

“Take the rest of the day off, Essie,” he hisses at her.

“But Daddy, it’s Sunday. Don’t you need me?”

“Off, Essie, off.” His nostrils are flaring and he’s turned all sorts of colours, none of them good. It seems her best bet is to turn without a word and walk away. That feels meek, but she doesn’t want to be faulted for disobedience on top of whatever it is she’s meant to have done wrong. She does, however, make a rather big show of holding out her damp cloth between thumb and forefinger and letting it fall to the floor, glaring back at her father all the while. Cressida knows this to be richly defiant, so she hurries a bit as she heads for the back.

***

She thinks of going to Fanny’s in Cheapside, but she’s not expecting her and the thought of having to talk with her bitter, insinuating mother instead entirely defeats her. She prowls the house, wasting time, not sleepy at all, even though she should be. There is no dress pattern intricate enough to keep her mind from wandering. The newspaper is all about large boats. There is nothing incriminating in the pockets of her father’s coat. Cressida is sick with restlessness after a mere half hour, so she decides to go for her second unescorted walk in as many days and remembers to bring her key. Sitting on the stoop of the Morrows’ so he can’t be seen through the pub window is Ockham, smoking.

“I was waiting for you.”

“Were you?” It’s almost a whisper.


End file.
